'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Monday, June 4, 2018

Woman cured of advanced breast cancer using own immune cells in ‘exciting’ global first

A woman has been completely cured of breast cancer after
doctors tweaked her
immune system, enabling it to destroy the tumours that had spread
through her body. The treatment, which
succeeded after all other conventional treatments had failed, marks the first
successful application of T-cell immunotherapy for late-stage breast cancer.

While the technique is
still in its early days, scientists have welcomed its potential as a future
treatment for cancers that have resisted all other forms of therapy. The 49-year-old
patient was treated by a team led by Dr Steven Rosenberg at the National Cancer
Institute (NCI) in Maryland. The team behind the
clinical trial, which is still ongoing, used modified T-cells – which make up
part the body’s immune response – to tackle the patient’s tumours.

Immunotherapy, which
involves stimulating the body’s natural defences to fight cancer, is already
being used to tackle certain cancers, and some forms are already available
on the NHS. However, the response
rate to even the most successful treatments is relatively low, with one
recently trialled therapy showing strong effects in only
around 10 per cent of prostate cancer patients.

Previous clinical
trials using immunotherapy to treat breast cancer have proved largely
ineffective. The new approach
pioneered by Dr Rosenberg and his team was based on an existing technique
called adoptive cell transfer that has proved effective when treating melanoma,
but not other forms of the disease... read more: